I have Debian 7 Wheezy amd64 in a single 350G partition. When I run the openSUSE DVD it looks like it is not recognizing Debian. I want to install openSUSE so that I can select Debian or openSUSE when I turn the computer on, how do I do that?
(I have an unallocated 1 TB partition and I want openSUSE on a 250 G section of that)
That’s unusual, unless it is installed with encrypted root. I’m not sure how you are deciding that it is not recognized.
In any case, once you have opensuse installed, you can modify the grub menu to ensure that it has an entry for Debian. I do that with a few lines in “/etc/grub.d/40_custom”.
It will be easier to tell you what to add after you have installed and can give us information on your partitions. And maybe the grub menu will already pickup your Debian system without adding anything.
Is there a guide to understanding what the suggested disk partition menu on the openSUSE installation is telling me (the documentation, I will read it then)?
This way I can also understand how to tell the GUI for installation to put everything on one partition (as you indicate here) and be certain I don’t corrupt the Debian installation.
I am not a Debian user and do not have much knowledge about it, but most Linux distributions use more then one partition. At least one for swap and one for the root file systems (you can of course add more file systems when you want and we advise to have one for /home, the installation also advises that by default). Are you realy sure your Debian only uses one partition?
In any case, to discuss your disk, please post the following (you can do that from Debian also IMHO):
fdisk -l
Here, I messed up my Debian install playing with the openSUSE settings … with a fresh Debian install here is my hard drive:
Disk /dev/sda: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders, total 2930277168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000f1f36
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 2889455615 1444726784 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 2889457662 2930276351 20409345 5 Extended
Partition 2 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/sda5 2889457664 2930276351 20409344 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Why Debian suggested a 20 GB swap !? but I went along with it.
This is badly readable. Can you please next time copy/paste computer text between CODE tags? You get the tags by clicking on the # button in the toolbar of the post editor.
Here, I messed up my Debian install playing with the openSUSE settings … with a fresh Debian install here is my hard drive:
I do not understand what you try to say here. Is what you show the present situation or not? When this is not the situation you want our help with, then there is no need to show it. We need the real situation where you have the problem.
And btw, do yousee that there are two partitions there, one for s file system and one for swap? Thus your statment in post # 1 above:
I have Debian 7 Wheezy amd64 in a single 350G partition
is not true. That is why we allways want computer evidence, like the fdisk -l listing. Because we do trust the computer more then human beings 
I took the original 350 GB and tried to install openSUSE and messed things up enough to get a boot message of “no operating system.” Obviously by the lack of a 350 G partition and my statement that Debian is a fresh install the logical implication is that the new numbers ARE the current drive setup. I reinstalled debian after the 350 GB post.
Thus,
as I am writing this my CURRENT hard drive looks like (Debian 7 installed):
fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders, total 2930277168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000f1f36
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 2889455615 1444726784 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 2889457662 2930276351 20409345 5 Extended
Partition 2 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/sda5 2889457664 2930276351 20409344 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Hopefully this is clearer.
When I am not wrong your two Debian partitions fill up the disk. There is no place fore openSUSE left.
Now your original statement is still not clear to me:
When I run the openSUSE DVD it looks like it is not recognizing
What do you mean with “run”? when this is the installation DVD, you should boot from it. Is that what you mean? Then tell what happened, which screens did you get, did you answer/choose things, were there error messages?
And then: how do you come to the conclusion that the installation does not “recognize” Debian?
Please take into account that we others are spread over all the globe except that nobody is sitting behind you.
Thus we depend completely on you for a detailed, precise description on what you do and what you see happening on the screen. You may post conclusions when you are careful. But the main information we need is what you did and what happened.
Very good, here is what i did:
Create extended RAID partition pdc_ddcdae_part1 (1.36 TB)
Create RAID partition pdc_ddcdae_part5 (156.88 MB) for /boot with ext4
Create swap RAID partition pdc_ddcdae_part6 (2.01 GB)
Create RAID partition pdc_ddcdae_part7 (20.00 GB) for / with ext4
Create RAID partition pdc_ddcdae_part8 (1.34 TB) for /home with ext4
“create” means to me that the entire hard drive is being redone and I want Debian intact. A good open source operating system, in my opinion, should easily share a hard drive with another good open source operating system … when I went to install I edited this in an attempt to avoid messing with Debian. Let’s not waste time on what I did… I would like to understand how to manually tell openSUSE what I want so I can cleanly dual boot Debian and openSUSE? Is there a manual, a video, or anything so I can understand what openSUSE is doing during installation?
RAID???
Is thus system configured as a RAID disk array???
Could the BIOS have a built in RAID option?? Do you have more then one drive? your previous post indicates only one drive.
It is possible that if FAKE RAID is turned on in the BIOS the install thinks this is a RAIDed drive.
Note you can always go to expert mode and make the partitions as you want them you do not have to use the suggested partitioning. But you should be sure that the RAID is turned of in the BIOS.
You can use the Debian swap as the openSUSE swap. But you need at least a root and I’d recommend a seperate home partition. swap should be 1/2xmemory. depending on is you are going to hibernate. roor should bt 15-30 gig and home as much for your personal files that you wish
A problem is that the extended partition is only big enough to fit the swap. Why???
You can have a total of 4 partitions one being an extended. In the extended you can have many virtual partitions. So normally I’d expect the extended to take up the rest od the drive.
@gogalthorp
The system was originally an HP ENVY VISION with Windows 8. I switched the BIOS to legacy boot so that UEFI wouldn’t interfere with me deleting Windows and installing Debian 7.
You may be right about the FAKE RAID and I will look around the BIOS when I get off of here. If FAKE RAID is on then I wonder if it was necessary for Windows to access the full 1.5 TB on the single drive? If RAID is on in the BIOS then could turning it off cause any problems in Debian 7, Grub, or anything else?
You suggested partitions for Root, Home, and assign sda5 to openSUSE for swap.
What do you suggest about the extended partition? Do you think I should use Parted Magic and try to shrink sda1 and enlarge sda2 (the extended partition) or is there a way to do all this with openSUSE installation DVD?
Thank you.
Looks like it. Although it normally also says that existing partitions are going to be removed. Did it say it in this case (just to be sure it picked up indeed the same disk)?
There could be two things
a) you do not have space on /dev/sda to add some more partitions, so the only possibility to install something is to remove existing ones. But I repeat - it should warn you that it is going to remove something.
b) you apparently have fake RAID on motherboard which openSUSE picked up. It is not clear whether Debian is installed on fake RAID as well - looks like it is not. In this case openSUSE may simply not be able to recognize existing partitions/filesystems.
In the end information is coming forward. Thank you.
I went to bed, but as you see, others are now taking over ,acting on the information you provided. I hope you now understand why I kept pressure on you to provide information. Without it, mere normal (not clairvoyant) people can not help you.
And as you will also have read above, your situation seems to be a rather special one (still not completley understood) and thus asking for some standard solution will not work. In fact the standard solution is to run the installer. In standard situations it works pretty well.
I switched the BIOS off of RAID. I am going to eliminate the Debian, make openSUSE the first install, try and put SUSE and Debian on 350 and 250 GB primary partitions, have about a 12 GB swap (I have 10 GB RAM), and the rest a logical partition. I will mark this thread solved once I am done reorganizing my Hard Drive. I hope this plan makes sense. Thank you, this discussion at least helped me decide that I need to reorganize my drive.
With that much RAM you really only need 2 gig unless you plan to hibernate.
HP is bad on shipping kit that has FAKE RAID turned on even if not needed.